operations

Disposition Codes Your Reps Will Actually Use

How to design a door disposition list short enough to tap in one second and precise enough to run a callback list from.

Every canvassing team eventually builds a disposition list. Most of them build it twice, because the first one has nineteen options and reps use four of them.

The disposition is the smallest unit of data your field operation produces. It is also the only thing standing between a day of knocking and a day of exercise. Getting the list right is worth more management attention than it usually gets.

The failure mode is length, not precision

A disposition list fails for one reason: it takes too long to use at the door.

A rep standing on a porch has a few seconds between the door closing and the next walk. If recording the outcome takes a dropdown, a sub-dropdown, and a free-text note, the rep will skip it, batch it from the truck at the end of the day from memory, and the data becomes a reconstruction rather than a record.

So the design constraint is brutal and simple: one tap, no scrolling, no typing required. Everything else is negotiable.

In practice that caps the list at somewhere between six and nine options, which is about as many as fit on a phone screen as buttons large enough to hit with a thumb in sunlight.

The eight that cover almost everything

A list that holds up across roofing, solar, pest, and home services:

Unknocked. The default. Not a disposition so much as the absence of one, but it needs to exist so "never attempted" is visibly different from "attempted and nothing happened."

Not home. Nobody answered. This is inventory, not a result. It is the single largest bucket on most teams and the most underworked.

Callback. Someone answered, there is interest or at least no refusal, and there is a reason to return at a stated time. The distinction from "not home" is that a human has been spoken to.

Not interested. A human answered and declined. Soft no. Can be reworked on a later cycle or after a storm.

Interested. A human answered, wants what you have, but is not booked. This is the bucket that leaks if nobody owns it.

Appointment set. Booked, on a calendar, with a time.

Sold. Signed.

Do not knock. A hard, permanent exclusion. Treated differently from everything above, and explained below.

That is eight. Note what is not on it.

What to leave off

Reasons. "Not interested: price," "Not interested: already has a contractor," "Not interested: renter." These feel valuable and they are the main cause of nineteen-item lists. The reason belongs in an optional note, not in the disposition, because the moment a rep has to choose between five flavors of no, the tap becomes a decision and the decision becomes a skip.

If you genuinely need reasons, add them as an optional second tap that the rep can ignore. Never as a required one.

Spanish-speaking, dog, gate, no trespassing sign. These are attributes of the door, not outcomes of the knock. A door can be behind a gate and also be a sold job. Attributes belong on the door record, so they persist across passes. Dispositions get overwritten on every knock.

"Pitched." Tempting, because pitch-to-set is a ratio worth tracking. But a rep cannot reliably self-report whether they delivered the pitch, and the data will be flattering. Infer it instead from the dispositions that imply a conversation happened.

Do not knock is a different kind of record

Every other disposition is a snapshot of one knock. Do not knock is a standing instruction, and it has to behave differently in three ways.

It survives reassignment. When the territory moves to another rep, the do-not-knock doors move with it. If your system resets dispositions at the start of a new pass, do not knock must be exempt.

It cannot be undone by a rep. Only a manager should be able to clear one. Otherwise a new rep who does not like the look of their callback list will quietly prune it.

It covers more than the explicit refusal. Posted no-soliciting signs, formal written requests, and local do-not-knock registries all belong in the same bucket. The legal backdrop is real: in Martin v. City of Struthers the Supreme Court struck down a blanket ban on knocking while noting that a city "can punish those who call at a home in defiance of the previously expressed will of the occupant." Many cities took that invitation and wrote sign-respect provisions into their solicitation ordinances. A do-not-knock disposition that your software forgets is a citation waiting to happen.

Make the disposition visible on the map

A disposition list only pays off if a rep can read the street at a glance. That means color, and it means the colors have to be consistent for everyone on the team forever.

A workable scheme:

• Neutral gray for unknocked, so the unworked part of the territory reads as empty.
• One cool color for not home, because it is inventory.
• One warm color for callback and interested, because they need action.
• Green for appointment set and a distinct green for sold, because they are the scoreboard.
• Red for not interested.
• Black or a hard outline for do not knock, so it is unmistakable at arm's length.

The point is not aesthetics. The point is that a rep walking a street should be able to hold the phone at waist height and see where to go next without reading a word.

Two dispositions that need a clock attached

Callback is worthless without a time. A callback with no timestamp is a not-home with extra steps. Require a return window when the rep taps callback, even if it is as coarse as "Thursday evening."

Sold needs a timestamp for a different reason. Door-to-door sales usually carry a statutory cancellation right. The federal Cooling-Off Rule at 16 CFR Part 429 gives a buyer the right to cancel a qualifying sale "at any time prior to midnight of the third business day after the date of this transaction," and applies to sales at the buyer's residence with a purchase price of $25 or more. The FTC's rule page is the starting point, and most states layer their own version on top with their own thresholds. A sold disposition with a date on it tells your office when the cancellation window closes. A sold disposition without one does not.

Write the definitions down and test them

The last step is the one teams skip. Write a one-sentence definition of each disposition, put it on one page, and then run a check: describe five real door outcomes to three different reps and see whether they pick the same code.

Common disagreements that surface in that test:

• Kid answers, parent not home. Not home or callback?
• Homeowner says "maybe in the spring." Interested or not interested?
• Nobody answers but a car is in the driveway and the TV is on. Not home, or something else?
• Renter answers and says the landlord decides. Not interested, or a note on the door record?

None of these have an objectively correct answer. All of them need a team answer, because a disposition list that two reps read differently produces numbers that cannot be compared.

The test of a good list

A disposition taxonomy is working when a manager can pull three lists on a Monday morning without talking to anybody: the callbacks due this week, the not-homes due for a different hour band, and the sold jobs whose cancellation window closes in the next two days.

If pulling those requires a conversation, the taxonomy is a label on a problem rather than a solution to one.

Canvass Pro ships this eight-state disposition set as the field language of the map, with one-tap logging and a color per state, so a street reads at a glance.